* Posts by Destroy All Monsters

16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008

MY EYES! Earth engulfed by BRIGHTEST EVER killer gamma-ray burst

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Re: Black magic

Still makes no sense.

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That said, April's event did have a brief but noticeable effect on the Earth's ionosphere.

Anyone have the numbers on how much energy was dumped into the atmosphere?

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Headmaster

Re: Black magic

I'm eagerly awaiting for you to make any sense at all.

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Be grateful!

I don't want to appear in a Greg Egan story.

On second thoughts, maybe I do.

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Paris Hilton

> The cosmic rays reached our world on April 27 in an event named GRB 130472A.

Called GRB 130427A, shurely?

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Re: In Leo?

"In the gamma quadrant"

Yoof will dig.

Tiny, invisible EXTRATERRESTRIAL INVADERS appear at South Pole

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Trollface

Re: Hum

Clearly you need Dr Who's patent neutronium bottle, ultracooled.

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We should have neutrino shotguns for this kind of deal.

I don't think black hole shenanigans are sufficient for this kind of action.

While supernovas can kick charge particles, in particular iron nuclei to considerable cosmic-ray energies over long distances of plasma surfing, the neutrino cannot be gripped by electromagnetic forces.

Once created, it's off.

And neutrino spectra from supernovae stay safely below 90 MeV AFAIK.

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Thumb Up

Re: WTF ???

It is also about 2 orders or magnitude more than can be achieved at the LHC collision point once it reopens.

We observed 28 neutrino candidate events (two previously reported), substantially more than the Formula expected from atmospheric backgrounds, and ranging in energy from 30 to 1200 TeV. With the current level of statistics, we did not observe significant clustering of these events in time or space, preventing the identification of their sources at this time.

Yep, that's 0.0002 Joule. In a neutrino. What the hell?

My tax money at work! More like this!

Huge horde of droids whacks code box GitHub in password-guess attack

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Re: Actually, there are no unhappy SVN users because of this

> Having said all that, who the hell entrusts their source code to a third party?

You do it everyday.

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Thumb Down

"Hackers have fired up a large army of remote-controlled computers"

More like lamers.

Gaming co ESEA hit by $1m fine for hidden Bitcoin mining enslaver

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That money is far less funny than the paper dollar.

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Big Brother

Re: Time Bitcoin was shut down

Mustachioed ex-corporal much?

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Facepalm

Jesus H. Christ

The ability to trace rolled-out modules to clearly specified requirements (known as "traceability" since the early 80s or so) really never caught on, right? Well, if you don't have one, you can at least plausibly deny everything. "Our Software Assurance is shit, honest m'lord".

I wonder WHAT ELSE is in that gaming software.

Microsoft touts SCROOGLE merch: Hopes YOU'LL PAY to dump on rival

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Re: Negative marketing

> yet look at most of these comments

Somebody is gonna fall off his decrepit moral high horse, watch out.

Or do I detect the smell of an astroturf damage limitation campaign in morningevening?

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The feel when!

Yes I know.

But maybe they will get better.

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Mushroom

Re: hmmm

Embraced, extinguished, extortioned, upgraded, unsecuritized, left to flap in the wind, innvationunbotherized incompatibilitized, opendocumentfomartized, walled gardened, apiundocumentized, apisurrepetitiouslychangerized, notuspportized, ballmered, fudded, EULAed, intellectually propertized, linuxcommunisted.

The death of Microsoft cannot come soon enough, and I do hope it is a horrid, messy one.

HURRI-KANO: Raspberry Pi kit for kids STORMS past funding target

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Childcatcher

Good, Good.

No unleash the power of the Turing Machine, young six-year old.

Cryptolocker infects cop PC: Massachusetts plod fork out Bitcoin ransom

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Pint

Two bitcoins.

That's a LOT of donuts!

It's like the pound sterling had returned with its honest-to-God value before it got transformed into paper money and was keynesianedinflated away

XBOX ONE ROUNDUP-of-the-ROUNDUPS: Everything YOU need to know

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Re: A 1.3 GB download

Tell your kids to go play outside.

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Facepalm

> 2013

> The release of another cobbled-together entertainment machine that is only viable through "ubiquitous broadband" meant to take over "your world" via orgasmic squirts of color and smiling people invading your living room while tripping on ketamines is "something"

> My Face When

Hot digital dog: A man’s best friend is still his... K-9

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Big Brother

"Psychology pattern checked and recorded"

I could only think of "The Twonky" by Henry Kuttner (alias Lewis Padgett). (See http://my.fit.edu/~rosiene/twonky.pdf -- Quite probably non-legit PDF), the house helper robot from the future - and from Nanny State Hell.

'FELSIC materials' find on MARS could rewrite Red Planet's history

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Headmaster

Science! How does it work.

It could also have been carefully deposited by dinosaurs from the latter trias dressed up in feathered tutus, but it's rather unlikely.

Prime Minister David Cameron in Twitter gaffe

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Re: It's not news, it's the latest Twitter scandal

What, do you want another moan about the EURO instead?

Winamp is still a thing? NOPE: It'll be silenced forever in December

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Pint

Good times were had with WinAmp on Windows 2K while I was installing server racks in the middle of the night. Only me and a bottle of Vodka. Only to get told by the female secretary that I was crazy.

Ah yes, so long ago.

Google shows off scanned-in Gettysburg Address drafts

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Big Brother

Bioshock!

Gettysburg Adress: Still Balderdash after 150 Years

James Bovard, November 19, 2013

I am mystified by all the whooping on the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. Most of the commentators seem to believe that Lincoln was an honest man touting the highest ideals.

The fact that warmongers like George W. Bush and Obama purport to idolize Lincoln should be a warning sign to attentive folks.

Massachusetts abolitionist Lysander Spooner offered the most concise refutation to President Lincoln’s claim that the Civil War was fought to preserve a “government by consent.” Spooner observed, “The only idea . . . ever manifested as to what is a government of consent, is this—that it is one to which everybody must consent, or be shot.”

The main lesson from the Gettysburg address is – the more vehemently a president equates democracy with freedom, the greater the danger he likely poses to Americans’ rights. Lincoln was by far the most avid champion of democracy among nineteenth century presidents—and the president with the greatest visible contempt for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Lincoln swayed people to view national unity as the ultimate test of the essence of freedom or self-rule. That Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, jailed 20,000 people without charges, forcibly shut down hundreds of newspapers that criticized him, and sent in federal troops to shut down state legislatures was irrelevant because he proclaimed “that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

Lincoln’s rhetoric cannot be judged apart from the actions he authorized to enforce his “ideals”:

In a September 17, 1863, letter to the War Department, Gen. William Sherman wrote: “The United States has the right, and … the … power, to penetrate to every part of the national domain. We will remove and destroy every obstacle — if need be, take every life, every acre of land, every particle of property, everything that to us seems proper.” President Lincoln liked Sherman’s letter so much that he declared that it should be published.

On June 21, 1864, before his bloody March to the Sea, Sherman wrote to the secretary of war: “There is a class of people [in the South] — men, women, and children, who must be killed or banished before you can hope for peace and order.”

On October 9, 1864, Sherman wrote to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant: “Until we can repopulate Georgia, it is useless to occupy it, but the utter destruction of its roads, houses, and people will cripple their military resources.” Sherman lived up to his boast — and left a swath of devastation and misery that helped plunge the South into decades of poverty.

General Grant used similar tactics in Virginia, ordering his troops “make all the valleys south of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad a desert as high up as possible.” The Scorched Earth tactics the North used made life far more difficult for both white and black survivors of the Civil War.

Lincoln was blinded by his belief in the righteousness of federal supremacy. His abuses set legions of precedents that subverted the vision of government the Founding Fathers bequeathed to America.

Micron takes on Intel with 'breakthrough' processor for streaming data

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Re: Everything old is new again

And their are not transputers either. Far from it.

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Paris Hilton

Re: Everything old is new again

How is a scan line rasterizer the same as processors on a DIMM?

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FAIL

Hahaha wow. What am I reading?

"Automata processor cuts through NP-hard problems like they're butter"

Just No.

Going overboard with headlines much, El Reg?

What next? Free energy found by combining lifters with homeopathy?

"Planted Motif" problems are NP-complete only as I read on Jimbo's big bag of trivia (NP-hardness may well mean that the problems is way, way harder). Even Micron's new approach at SIMD processing is not going to crack large NP-complete problems significantly faster - speedup is linear, but the cost still increases exponentially with the problem size, so no joy.

And why do I have to go and google for Micron's documentation.

Gates chokes up, WEEPS to Microsoft shareholders amid talk of CEO hunt

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Flame

Like Hollande declaring that he favors a peaceful Middle East.

It's time that El Reg mirrored the appropriate image for this article onto its site.

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Re: What?

Copland's "Microserfs" indicates that it was hell for Microsoft people, too.

"Be nice to me, Bill... please!"

But at least they got lucite motivators and - sometimes - share options out of it.

Intel: 'Y'know that GPU-accelerated computing craze? Fuggedaboutit'

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Holmes

"Yeah, Intel. What are you going to do, bleed on me??"

Apparently there is some confusion about how multicore is in competition with GPGPU processor. Newsflash: They are complementary. So cramming more Intel CPUs in there is good, as long as you can afford the gas turbine to power them and the Freon recirculator remove the waste heat, but this wont cause the GPGPUs to be dropped on the floor.

Still waiting for NVidia or AMD to attached ARM cores to their boards, so that the motherboard becomes just a dispatcher.

Men have LARGE APPENDAGES, are OXYGEN THIEVES: Science

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Trollface

Knobbly male hooters are much larger than women's diminutive noses because of lean muscle mass, a new study has uncovered.

Check your privilege!

Samsung says knickers to poor Gear sales claim, eyes pants to sell more

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The are talking about the OTHER market place.

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Headmaster

Re: More Samsung bull.. Galaxy Gear it's a flop!

Please! This is not a fruitfan fest.

Decades ago, computing was saved by CMOS. Today, no hero is in sight

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Headmaster

Re: The end is nigh! Really?

1) It's "premise"

2) It's not the end of Moore, but of his observation

3) What Moore observes is clear and has nothing to do with "advances in size/power/energe/storage/connectivity/bandwidth/price" wishy-washyness: " the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years" (and the price of the end product will be the same)

4) THOSE TIMES ARE OVER. The economic vagaries of going to XUV already say as much.

5) Deal with it.

> but we have long since moved on from the single notion of cramming more transistors on a lump of sand.

LOLNO. Still waiting to run Windows properly on multicore.

Google deletes Maps satellite photos of 14-year-old's unsolved murder

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Childcatcher

> aircraft taking pictures wasn't overhead

More gorgon-stare-equipped drones are clearly needed.

BLAST OFF! NASA's MAVEN Mars probe ROARS into orbit

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Headmaster

RIGHT!

but in the end a modicum of sanity won through and funding was found

Is this code for "they stopped sulking like enormous gay elephants throwing toys out of massive prams, sucked it down and went back to their hobbies"?

DON'T tell me all the bills hadn't been through in September already. That's how the military did it.

Btw, how are the Zumblatt DELUXE FAILVESSEL and the Gerald Ford DEATHTRAP/USELESS AS THE BISMARCK CARRIER SERIES coming? Can we please transfer the money to space exploration?

Build your own WORKING Sonic Screwdriver... for a UNDER A FIVER

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Crazy Eddy!

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Boffin

And in the next project I want to see a Lazy Gun.

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Re: Sex Toys!

These are not toys but SERIOUS TOOLS... SEX TOOLS!

Budget decay kills NASA plutonium drive project

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Mushroom

FREEDOM INTENSIFIES!

The US is a permafailtrain of formaldehyde-laden FEMA trailers full of bad decision making and of non-decision making by a bunch of well-moneyed bipartisan controlfreaks.

NASA’s Plutonium Problem Could End Deep-Space Exploration

"Any hiccups in funding for plutonium-238 production could put planetary science into a tailspin and delay, strip down, or smother nuclear-powered missions. The outlook among scientists is simultaneously optimistic and rattled.

The reason: It took countless scientists and their lobbyists more than 15 years just to get lawmakers’ attention. A dire 2009 report about “The Problem,” authored by more than five dozen researchers, ultimately helped slip the first earnest funding request into the national budget in 2009. Congressional committees squabbled over if and how to spend $20 million of taxpayers’ money — it took them three years to make up their minds."

And don't get me started on "Obamacare" which turns out to be just another voter trolling biz. Are the troops out of Afghanistan yet, "Head Held High"? Yeah. How about Obama's "Asian Pivot" (i.e. encircling the nation that holds a few trillion of your debt and is an important trading partner). Yeah ... that nation. At least we have Janet Yellen with her hand on the money-printing press. Hold on to your gonads, that nation is going places real soon now.

File-NUKING Cryptolocker PC malware MENACES 'TENS of MILLIONS' in UK

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Re: The gloves are off

The SAS cannot just drop into Russia. They have at least to tell the FSB first, otherwise the rubberhosing will be applied on the incorrect recipient.

Here is a little story about "unnanounced operations" by the CIA in Turkey, for instance. It's a fun read:

Spy vs. Spy: Iran, Turkey, and Israel Edition

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Big Brother

Re: ecofeco Let's do the math

It's not like lots of persons who thought exactly along those lines are now holding very important positions in the political-economic nomenclatura.

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Holmes

Re: Hmmmm

I don't think "Bitcoin" is a nefarious organization lurking in a lair underneath [preferred volcano]. "They" don't exist, Mulder!!

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Holmes

Somewhat (it's cashlike anonymous but you can indeed follow the bitcoin in particular when the bitcoin is exchanged with the government-sponsored paper money)

But additionally, infinite money printing by the bitcoin central bank is a no-no.

'Planned maintenance' CRIPPLES nearly HALF of all Salesforce instances in Europe, US

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Re: Salesforce lays off 200 employees ..

In marketing, not sysoping?

Quantum computer in world record qubit stunner

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Pint

Re: Just do the math

Personally, I like Scott Aaronson's quite a lot:

Quantum Computing Since Democritus

under which we find:

PHYS771 Lecture 9: Quantum

PHYS771 Lecture 10: Quantum Computing

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Headmaster

Re: Re. quantum consciousness

Cough! Your ideas are very speculative, my dear colleague.